The plain wooden coffins are lowered, one by one, from the back of a morgue truck into the hands of waiting inmates, men standing in a pre-dug trench already filled with other bodies on a small, narrow strip of land off the coast of the Bronx. The only other people on the island – beside the inmates and the dead – are armed Department of Correction officers, overseeing this New York City burial as the rest of the nation’s largest metropolis – almost wholly unaware this place exists – get ready for work. This is just a regular Thursday on Hart Island, essentially the city’s potter’s field – though not all who end up here, it turns out, are destitute or unknown. The bodies are collected from the city morgues several times a week, ferried to a dock at the end of a residential street by a truck driver who alternately naps and drinks Dunkin Donut’s coffee as he awaits the arrival of inmates from Rikers Island. Then the morgue truck and the inmates take a boat across the Long Island Sound, disembarking to drive along unpaved roads to open grave sites. Trenches ten feet deep are left open, week…